Cosy Science

Is CANCER a genetic disease?

Could we cure everyone by sequencing their genome?

 

One of the key reasons why this will not work is heterogeneity. Cancer is a single cell disease and modern biomedicine is years away from coping with diagnosing and treating single cells. Another key reason is redundancy. Cells have so many different pathways to achieve one thing. So, how can we ever target one pathway and then hope a cell does what we want it to do? It is all about complexity, stupid! On a more serious note, this poses fundamental challenges to doctors, to clinical researchers, and to basic researchers like me. We will talk about those, and who knows, perhaps we come up with a great new idea how we could altogether tackle some of the issues of cancer.

 

Gaudenz Danuser is currently Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. His lab combines molecular cell biology, live cell imaging, and mathematical modeling to study how (cancer) cells migrate. He was trained as a musician and electrical engineer. Before moving to Harvard he held faculty appointments at ETH Zurich (his alma mater) and at the Scripps Research Institute in California.